Plan 28: Babbage's Analytical Engine project gets underway

Thanks for spearheading this effort, it would be great if the Engine could be built.

As for the documents, your post gives the impression that it was mostly about bandwidth, i.e. "but the museum needs just a little more time before they can cope with a flood of inquiries". While I fully agree that the best way to put it out is a nicely designed web page giving all the historical context and interpretations, well, "better is the enemy of good", these things are always low on the priority list for cash-strapped organizations. If they can't create such a site then nobody will have access to them. I don't quite like this all or nothing approach of such institutions.

Also, Babbage invented his own notation for describing the movement and interaction of cogs, levers etc. inside the machine. He used this notation to augment the static plans to describe the motion. He also constantly refined the notation.

What he left behind were hundreds of nice plans of the Analytical Engine all of which are incomplete. Plus he left his notebooks. Thousands and thousands of pages of jottings, sketches, and thoughts. Interpreting all that is going to be a lot of work.

They claim they don't have the resources to make them available to the public. You are answering a completely different question. They seem to be saying they don't have the funds and/or infrastructure, not that they don't want to make them available.

(unless the parent post has been edited)

I don't see how your analogy applies. There are, of course, many examples of digitized versions of manuscripts online, some with and some without lengthy explanations. Most of these manuscripts require at least as much efforts as Babbage's plans to understand. Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester is the first example that comes to mind as a popular example. Other examples may be found here (http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/08/12/digital-hu...).

I have no expertise on Babbage whatsoever; yet I would have liked to peruse images of these plans just for the sheer beauty and importance of them. You can't do that with Polish versions of Lem's text.

So how are you going to power this thing once it is built? Wind, water or steam? :-)

Edit: I do hope it will be steam powered! (At least once - just so someone can record what it would sound like).

It would seem to me that building the Analytical Engine without following the same sort of material and construction constraints that the Difference Engine #2 project followed would be, in a sense, invalid. The theoretical validity of the means of computation, the "instruction set" and so on could be proven by a "perfect materials" simulation of the machine alone, but things like "signal propagation" (or, rather, the mechanical equivalent thereof) are part and parcel of the physical construction of the machine.

There has to be at least some degree of vindicating Babbage involved in a project of this sort. If it turns out that personality conflicts and a certain shortsightedness on the par of the BA were all that stood between the machine as dream and a major change in the course of history (as some people believe), that makes a very different story than the one that posits that the machine could not have been constructed as imagined; that the partial mill's errors were at least partly due to the fundamental limitations of the materials and processes available for construction at the time.

Yes, it would be nice to know whether the machine could have worked in theory, but it's a much more interesting question to consider what difference the machine might have made if it could have worked in practice.